Vicissitude and Season

Soon, the serious post about the novels and publishing decisions and so forth. For now, the writing brain is still buzzing with "oh, Mr. Finch" and "oh, Sergeant Hathaway" and "oh, Aral I-mean-Viceroy-Count-Admiral" (none of which, by the way, sound like "oh, Mr. Darcy," at least in the sense of swooniness. They are all rather exasperated and empathetic and amused and okay, the Aral one is a little swoony, but not in a wet-poet-shirt sort of way. Yes?). Which, okay, means there will be more fic, though I can't promise anything except the Lewis one since I am contracted to do that (and have made a pretty good start), but I can't talk about that one because it is Secret.

Other things I may write in the future:

The most probable is the one that penwiper26 gave me the impetus for by asking quite a while ago for the first private conversation between Aral and Ekaterin, and then added a bunny recently about Aral and Tej, and I thought, well, let's extend that to Laisa and Kareen while we're at it, and throw in Alys for good measure. So, what I will hope to write is Five Conversations Aral Had With Daughters-In-Law and Um-Daughters-In-Law and Alys-Who-Is-Decidedly-Not-A-Daughter-In-Law-But. And I mention it here because I had thought, give it to L. for her birthday! but here it is past mid-November and no. That will not happen. Hopefully it will happen before her next birthday.

Also, these:

The one where Harold Finch is the Fisher King (kingfisher, geddit?) and no, I have no clue how but it's a cool idea, yes?

The sequel to "Sparrow" where Harold and Simon have a Serious Talk about machines and bodies and spying and stuff. I would have to make up some sort of plot for this, at least as backstory. But still, this is more likely than the others to actually happen.

The Lewis/Sherlock crossover where Sherlock comes to Oxford during his hiatus and falls into the middle of an investigation in which Philip Horton reappears as the star witness, and there is interesting stuff about Asperger's and some sort of tug-of-war over Philip between Sherlock and Hathaway. This would, clearly, also involve plot. And research.

Or, quite possibly, none of the above.

In other news, I meant to wait for Christmas to reread Dialogues of the Dead and Death's Jest-Book but I failed to do so (I must, however, remember to post my very strange list of Christmas books at the appropriate time). Oh, Reginald Hill. RIP and I still adore you. Ah, and if we are proposing strange-but-not-impossible crossovers:

The one where Franny Roote meets Root, and sociopathic underhanded mayhem ensues. Bad code, indeed. (But seriously, no one but me would read that. Unless I can convince some of you to read Reginald Hill. And watch PoI. C'mon... *holds out candy*)

A rather shitty weekend-plus of rhinovirus, migraine, and oh-oops-not-menopause-completely-yet have at least given me more reading time, so I can now say I've read every word of the Dalziel-Pascoe series. Alas, sort of. I mean, it's been fun, but this is it, and unlike with living authors, or authors who were at least living when I finished their books, I can't expect more (although that's not all he wrote, so I could read the stand-alones and the other short series too).

There's also the oddity of having read it so out of order - yeah, I did enter the Vorkosigan saga with Komarr and the Aubrey-Maturin books with The Letter of Marque, but then corrected my error quickly and started at the beginning. This time, not so much, and I'll need to wait a while before going through it all again in the right sequence. I ended up with Child's Play, which is probably best known to fans as "the one where Wield comes out," provoking the totally unflappable Dalziel to the response in the subject line (and "I'd have been worried else that I'd not mentioned it to you." Pascoe, the (relatively) sensitive liberal, is of course flabbergasted at the revelation). Other stuff happens too, naturally: murder and such.

So, overall, much worth the time invested: some of them are just pretty good, some are damned clever, some give me that feeling I recall from first venturing into O'Brian that I'm being ravished by someone with complete control over the language and a talent for distraction from any inadequacies that exist.

I'm also feeling a trifle Yorkshire-dominated, between Hill's books, "Downton Abbey," and the kid starting rehearsals (as assistant director) for "The Secret Garden" (the musical). Maybe a revisit to "All Creatures Great and Small" would be appropriate.

All caught up to US broadcast on "Downton," by the way, so 2.06 or "The war is over, hurrah, now we can devote ourselves fully to soap opera." I think any show where I greet the credits with crack-filled (yet entirely likely) predictions for the next episode has outlived its creative drama potential, but I'm still having fun with it, and we'll see how far they can push the melodrama; please do not spoil me.

And, oh shit, I have a lot of work to catch up on. Let's start with more caffeine.

First, two quotations from author's introductions, cut for length:

( Patrick O'Brian )

( Reginald Hill )

These are actually examples of different phenomena; O'Brian's characters are living multiple fictional years within the historic year of 1812, whereas Hill's are stretching out 10 years of fictional life over 20 that the author and his readers are experiencing. But my subject line actually referred to the quirk of the author explaining himself. Does anyone have any additional examples of this - not of fiction stretching or compressing time, since that happens to most series characters, but of authors stepping forward to talk about it?

I wrote a little story a few years ago taking advantage of O'Brian's time-fiddling. Fictional time is just a very cool thing and I don't think we notice it enough (although perhaps to do so twists the muscles of our minds in painful directions; everything in moderation).